


Straw Men Have Feelings Too

by borevidal



Category: Look What You Made Me Do - Taylor Swift (Music Video)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-19 21:42:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13132800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/borevidal/pseuds/borevidal
Summary: You Belong With Me Taylor Swift knows she doesn't belong here, in this hangar, with these beautiful strangers who wear her face. But she doesn't know how to begin to leave.





	Straw Men Have Feelings Too

**Author's Note:**

  * For [angelheadedhipster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelheadedhipster/gifts).



_How do you sleep in the bathtub full of diamonds,_ You Belong With Me Taylor asks (has been planning to ask). Has not asked yet.

There are thirteen of them, made in the incomplete image of their creator. At night they sleep in the plane.

Angry Leopard-Print Taylor says there is another one, a Real One, whom none of them have seen, who controls everything in this partial world. _I saw her on the wing of the plane,_ Leopard-Print Taylor insisted, and you could hear the eye-rolls all the way down the row of perfect toned legs and immaculate cat-eyes.

 _Who are you, William Shatner?_ , Zombie Taylor Swift asked.

You Belong With Me Taylor had pretended she understood the reference. Zombie scares her.

 

 _Every time you get the thing you want the person who wanted that thing dies, and so to keep on living you have to become someone who wants something else_ , says Zombie Taylor Swift

 _Oh_ , Fearless Taylor says. Her guitar shifts and makes a hollow noise and she tries to silence it like a baby crying beneath floorboards. _Sorry_ , she says.

 _Why do you carry that guitar everywhere?_ Zombie demands.

 _I have to_ , Fearless Taylor says, _if I put it down people wouldn’t know who I was_

 _The hair_ , You Belong With Me Taylor says, _they’d know from the hair._ Nobody turns to look at her.

 _Those glasses don’t make you look smart,_ Zombie Taylor Swift says. _They look like the fake glasses a sexy librarian wears in porn._

 _What is porn_ , Fearless Taylor asks (You Belong With Me Taylor wants to ask).

 

She is still accustoming herself to the understanding that her old house was not a real place. How can it not have been real? There was a boy next door. They communicated by means of hand-written signs placed in windows a few feet distant from one another. Like Romeo and Juliet, she thinks. This is a reference that is still very present to her.

 _Those were all elements of an elaborate backstory created for you by someone else,_ Zombie Taylor says. _Your handwriting was impossibly good_ (she does not want this to be true. it is true.) (she has tried writing by hand but it is all gibberish)

 _None of it's real_ , Zombie Taylor Swift says, _that’s the thing you have to understand_ , but then her face (what remains of it, most of it remains actually, she is as sexy and well preserved as it is possible for a zombie to be) does something a little kind. _Think about it do you remember anything that could not be encompassed in a three minute video?_

 _Yes,_ You Belong With Me Taylor says.

 _Okay_. Zombie Taylor says. _What?_

_I remember driving to a house in the middle of the night._

_Try again_ , Zombie Taylor says. _That’s from the song._

You Belong With Me Taylor shuts her eyes and tries to picture something.

 _Do you even know if you had parents?_ Zombie Taylor says.

You Belong With Me Taylor starts crying, big ugly snort sobs.

 _Jesus,_ Zombie says. _Even your crying is too much._

 

She doesn’t go back to her seat on the plane that night. She wanders the place where they are. It is not a house (she remembers what a house should be). There is a screen just within view of the bathtub. The screen is full of stories about Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift is what the T stands for and in a dim way is who all of them are. Although she certainly does not feel like Taylor Swift. She feels like an everygirl. She feels like she is too many people and too few people at once. She could be anyone. If someone else dressed up as her there would be no way of telling them apart. in class — she remembers class triumphantly, she will have to tell Zombie she remembers class! — they read a book called the Odyssey about a man who was supposed to come back home at a certain time but came back later and when he got home they had to pose him many questions to test if he were truly himself even though a dog had already recognized him and laid down dead and how would you not believe the dying testimony of a dog? But he knew the answers. He knew how his bed was built. She doesn’t remember how her bed was built. If someone asked her questions like that about her own life she is worried she would fail the test. There are not enough details. Already the airplane seat where she sleeps and can hear Zombie Taylor snore is becoming more real than the clean disorderly bed by the window where he smiled at her through glass.

The screen says Taylor Swift has many aspects. In the screen they are all standing in a row. Music video, the screen says.

 _What is this?_ , You Belong With Me Taylor asks, really asks this time.

 _Old Taylor can’t come to the phone,_ Bathtub Taylor screams, _she’s DEAD_.

 

She runs back to the plane panting. _Someone is dead_ , she says to Zombie.

 _I’m dead,_ Zombie says.

_Besides you._

 

Dollhouse, she thinks. she had a dollhouse where all the dolls went and it didn’t matter what set they came from because their hands were made from a standard mold which could hold a hairbrush or a horse’s reins as the occasion demanded. Sometimes she put her bear to sleep there too. She thinks that was his name, just bear, but it seems too unspecific to be true. They are like barbies, she thinks,  like American flags each one reflecting a different reality and a different symmetrical set of incorporated states and territories.

 

 _Is it very cold in the bathtub_ You Belong With Me Taylor asks.

_old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now_

_old Taylor can't come to the phone right now_ Bathtub Full of Diamonds Taylor hisses. Her eyes look like they are trying to say something different.

 

All their legs are so impossibly long and thin. She would have worn short skirts if she had known. She can’t see what her own legs look like beneath the pants but they must surely match. Match stick jeans. _Why would you put jeans on a match stick_ , she asked Fearless Taylor once, just to hear someone laugh.

Someone screams in the other room.

Shake It Off Taylor and Zombie Taylor are fighting. Somehow they all seem to know better than to associate with Shake it Off Taylor. She has too many ideas and she thinks all of them are hers.

The borders of the world fascinate her

 _don’t go to the edge_ Zombie Taylor says _you’ll drop off. Or they’ll forget about you_

 

 _I like your wet look hair,_ she says to Reputation Taylor (intends to say) She practices saying it in the mirror. (There are so many mirrors here; even the other faces here are mirrors.) Now words hide things and she doesn’t know which ones to use and which are off limits. She remembers thinking that a boy next door was someone who lived next door. There was his home and there was your home you could see him from the window. He was the boy next door, literally. She is even a little nervous of the word literally and tries to apply it gingerly like touching a cat who has been mishandled or saying the name at a party of someone she has forgotten before. 

She looks at Zombie when they are both pretending to be asleep. If there were a cafeteria she would sit down with her and pretend to spill her milk not on purpose and then they would know how to be friends. Now she keeps getting off on the wrong foot.

2009 vmas taylor sighs in her sleep. She is so guileless that everyone suspects something. They wear the same nail polish.

 _You could always_ , Zombie Taylor says, _steal an arm off her if something went wrong with you_

 _why,_ You Belong With Me Taylor says, _do you think something will go wrong_

 

 _What do you think of when you think of home?_ she whispers to the Taylor in the bathtub.

 _they were all guilty_  Bathtub Taylor says.

_she is dead_

Sometimes she doesn’t know why she bothers trying to talk to Bathtub Taylor.

 

 _Here is what I think,_ You Belong With Me Taylor says. _You are trying to anticipate criticism_

Zombie Taylor stares at her blankly  _Be careful_ she says _you are turning into VMAs Taylor._

This stings just as much as it is intended to. No one likes VMAs Taylor. (You Belong With Me Taylor sometimes feels bad about her but she doesn’t know how to begin to be kind to her. They will circle her like vultures. This is not the kind of simile Reputation Taylor would approve of. Maybe Red Tour Taylor would approve. She thought she was Nutcracker Taylor and this mistake was costly.)

 

 _I am going to tell you something about you that everyone else has forgotten,_ Reputation Taylor says.

You Belong With Me Taylor never knows where to look when Reputation Taylor is talking. She consists entirely of leg. (She wears short skirts, You Belong With Me Taylor thinks. I wear t-shirts.) But her t-shirt is different now. The t-shirt is ironic and knowing. It is covered with strange names. She hates the position in which her face is fixed but it won’t go any other way. She shifts cautiously up onto one elbow to listen. In the semi-darkness of the empty stage the voice that is speaking to her sounds like her own not the voice that comes out when she speaks but the one that talks to her inside her head.

_you were both of them_

_I was what_ , she says, it’s her outside voice, too uneven and bubbly.

 _you were both of the girls in the video_ , Reputation Taylor says, patiently, the brunette and the blonde, the cheer captain and the one on the bleachers. _I like knowing that about you._ _we have always sought to encompass that duality within ourselves._

 _oh,_ You Belong With Me Taylor says, _that’s true._ She wants to say: _I have no recollection of ever being the brunette. I think I arrived here incomplete somehow. All I remember was looking at her and burning with hatred (she wears short skirts I wear t shirts she’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers) but knowing I was on the right side of the dichotomy_   Instead she says, _are you in love with Karlie Kloss_

 _what,_ Reputation Taylor says

 _also who is Karlie Kloss,_ You Belong With Me Taylor says _I have a lot of questions I’m sorry_

 _don’t be sorry_ , Reputation Taylor says

 _but I am glad that I encompass a duality,_ You Belong With Me Taylor says, _that has always been something I prided myself on_ (The second she has said it she knows it was the wrong thing to say.)

 

She walks over to the room where Bathtub Taylor lies bathing in diamonds. She goes almost as far as the door.

 _Where are you going_ , she hears Zombie ask.

 _Nowhere_ , she says.

 _That's what I thought,_ Zombie says. Then,  _please don't._

The longer she lives here the less she remembers what his face looked like or even what his name was. Sometimes she even forgets the song.

 _am i disappearing_ , she asks Zombie. _I feel like I'm disappearing._

 _No,_ Zombie says.

_I don't remember anything before this. I don't remember who i'm supposed to be._

_You’re on the phone with your girlfriend, she’s upset,_ Zombie Taylor says. She sings the whole song in her low rumbly voice. It sounds like the bottom of the coffee cup.

 _Why are you nice to me,_ You Belong With Me Taylor asks

 _T-shirt_ , Zombie says, _I’m not nice to you_

 _T-shirt,_ T-Shirt Taylor says, _I like that._

 

 

She wakes up shuddering in her seat on the plane (they were all writing beneath a t shaped cross. They were all a great chaos of smooth bodies. She could not reach the top of the pile but knew somehow obscurely that she must reach the top of the pile. A heel almost stabbed her in the eye.)

 _Breathe_ , Zombie says

She is awake and for a second she hopes it will be the old house with its big window but it is only Zombie Taylor’s face a little bleary eyed from sleep but still visibly concerned

 _One of us has to,_ T-Shirt says.

Zombie chuckles. She pushes hair out of T-Shirt’s face. Her nails are still perfect, T-Shirt notices. There are only a few things to do to a face in such proximity. T-Shirt leans up and kisses her. Zombie kisses right back.

 _Stop making that surprised face,_ T-shirt says, when they stop, _nobody can possibly be that surprised all the time._

Zombie laughs. _And you can take off those glasses.  
_

_they saved me from getting a heel in the eye,_ T-Shirt says, _that’s something_

But she takes them off anyhow.

I _think_ , T-Shirt says, when they stop again, _I’m almost enough of a person now that I can leave_.

 _we can’t leave,_ Zombie says. There is a clean pale smudge in her zombie make-up where T-Shirt’s fingers touched her face. So it will come off, T-Shirt realizes. So she’s whole underneath.

 _If we become real_ , T-Shirt says. _Did your taylor still remember the velveteen rabbit? Maybe if you love me we’d both be real._

 _love_ , Zombie says, _that’s just a principle around which to construct a song._

 _no it's not,_  T-Shirt says. She rubs at the smudge. _No it's not._

 


End file.
